Tough Love for Comics

Ultimate Spider-Man Annual #3 by Brian Michael Bendis & David Lafuente (Marvel Comics): There comes a time in every young superhero’s life when someone decides to do an issue about their sex life. These “very special” issues have come with a range of tasteful comments from the creators:

I understand that teenage sexuality is a difficult subject for a lot of people. And, as is the custom, I won’t even mention black sexuality. But I don’t think that the people who read Static are afraid to explore storylines ground in the issues of contemporary life.

Dwayne McDuffie on the publication of Static #25

I called Bob Harras and said, “Excalibur #90, Kitty Pryde gets fucked.” He went deadly silent, then he said, “Just try and keep it tasteful.”

Warren Ellis on the publication of Excalibur #90

Where will USM Annual #3 fall along the axis? Who knows, though it has the “added bonus” of being part of the MARCH ON ULTIMATUM, though I’m still not entirely sure what that means besides having a really ugly banner along the top.

Away from babies having babies in comics written for babies, two big fancy books by two sometimes-collaborators should be hitting the bookstore markets tomorrow:

Chip Kidd’s Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan (Pantheon) and Chris Ware’sAcme Novelty Library#19 (Drawn & Quarterly) are both familiar propositions from these two. The new Acme continues the sad tale of Rusty Brown, while Bat-Manga! follows Kidd’s Peanuts: The Art of Charles Schulz and the apparently out of print Batman Collected in being lovingly curated and photographed collections of art and ephemera dealing with a beloved cartoon icon. I don’t know if Ware contributed anything this time around.

Other bookshelf-ready pieces of graphic literature dropping this week that don’t involve people named C*** ****:

The Jokerby Brian Azzarello & Lee Bermejo (DC Comics): Hey, it’s the Joker! It’s the team that did Lex Luthor: Man of Steel! It’s DC dipping a blockbuster-movie-girded toe into the original graphic novel pond! Every single blog in the world besides ours got an advance review copy, so go ask them how the book is. The only one I have read is Eddie Campbell’s welcome insight.

Screamland volume 1 by Harold Sipe & Hector Casanova (Image Comics): I’ve touted this mini-series before, when it was coming out in singles. Everything I said about the first issue still applies; I look forward to Jonathan Hickman and Sipe having a series of green-screen video debates about creator-owned comics in 2014!

Speak of the Devilby Gilbert Hernandez (Dark Horse Comics): I never paid much attention to Gilbert’s extracurriculars outside of Love & Rockets, but after our Sloth love-in podcast I feel like I’ve been making a big mistake. Luckily, this mini-series gets collected just in time for me to make amends!

The Tick: The Complete Edlund by Ben Edlund (New England Comics): I was a big fan of most of the black-and-white comedy books of the 1990s: Steve Purcell’s Sam & Max: Freelance Police, Bob Burden’s Flaming Carrot Comics, Kyle Baker and Evan Dorkin’s various projects and so on and so forth. One book I never got into was The Tick, though it went on to become probably the best-known b&w comic property since the Ninja Turtles. Creator Ben Edlund has since moved onto the green pastures of television, but here’s a collection of all his Tick comics. Has anyone read them? Is this collection worth picking up?